Lucy’s Neighbor.
“One More Chance,” the first song from Till It’s Gone, the new album from Lucy’s Neighbor, is a blast of sunny pop, from the driving rhythms to the splashes of guitar, to the direct, hopeful vocals that yearn for something simple. “Give me one more chance to see the light / One more dance with you tonight / One more chance to finally get it right,” sings Derek DiFronzo. “I gotta find my way back home.”
As the pre-election headlines and endless churn of social media whip us into a frenzy, the eight songs on Till It’s Gone are a welcome reprieve, a reminder of a life beyond screens and politics where people really do just want to get together and have a good time. The four musicians in the New Haven-based band — DiFronzo on vocals, Ed Flynn on bass, Tom Quagliano on drums, and Dave Esposito on guitar — should know. They play with the unfussy skill of people who have heard and played a lot of pop music, and are now adepts at putting their own spin on it.
So “Kansan Girl” is built around a wistful descending hook from Esposito that is more than enough to propel the song through another heartfelt ode to a girl that has just enough of a touch of cinematic surrealism to keep things interesting, as the girl in question is the kind that, facing a storm bearing down on her town, bursts into song. The band constructs a spacier, sparser on “Same New York We Used to Know,” a clear-eyed view on the way the largest city in the area has changed — and stayed the same — in ways not altogether good. The title track turns up the volume for a song that feels like it could have been written during the current pandemic (though it didn’t have to be), as it’s a rumination on the way people can live their lives at a such a breakneck pace that they don’t ever quite appreciate what they had.
After another in the form of “I Don’t Want to Know,” Lucy’s Neighbor returns to highly melodic territory with the contemplative “Momentary Bliss.” The next song, however, might be the most successfully poppy song on a record full of pop, as it’s a song about someone who can’t dance and struggles to connect with a girl on the dancefloor (“even Arthur Murray can’t save me,” DiFronzo sings) that is, of course, highly danceable. It’s a good setup for the final song on the album. It’s called “Nothing to Say!!” But even before that song surges forward, we know Lucy’s Neighbor is just being cheeky. Till It’s Gone is a distractingly fun album by a band that has plenty to talk about.